I tripped over this blog by happy aecndcit. I studied Catherine in the academic context of a comparison of Russian serfdom and US slavery but also in the rather startling immediate post 1989 political situation with lecturers rather grumpily having to completely rewrite their lecture notes and the (honest) students asking but where exactly is Abkhazia? .As a mature student I was very struck by the monumental task that C had to undertake to rebuild the Russian state. Is it true that at her first council meeting she asked for a map of Russia and there wasnt one so they sent a clerk to the nearest bookshop to buy one? It is at least indicative.There is plenty of evidence that C was an active participant in the enlightenment her correspondnence with Voltaire, funding the completion of the Encyclopedia inexchange for Diderot's archives ( are they still in Russia or did they never get there?) and of course poor old Diderot's visit not to mention Jeremy Bentham. I came to the view that whatever she might have believed personnally she did not believe that too much liberty would lead to the greatest good of the greatest number. Seeing what happened to France was she entirely wrong?To get to the point. Was she not right to sweep the immediate disasterous past under the rug? There is an interesting modern precedent in France. General de Gaulle did exactly the same after WW2 to heal the divisions in France. Interestingly there is reason to believe that Vladimir Putin models himself on de G. to some extent. Equally I have always thought his Russian role model (perhaps German would be more accurate) was Catherine not Peter but then that would not be very macho publicity wise.Final question is it really likely that all the peasants backed Pugachev? If so how was he defeated? It is quite likey that many of them went along with the rebels for their personal safety.What a ramble great blog.Robert

2.
| Jan 17, 2014

Intgclieenle and simplicity - easy to understand how you think.

3.
| Sep 3, 2013

This is so interesting, John! First, I feel like I see a spike of cases of peploe firming up their status in the early 1760s, too and my theory is that it has a lot to do with the third revision. The action of cleaning up the books certainly affected individuals and societies in terms of having them register properly, and I can also see it having the effect of making societies guard their privilege more carefully.As far as what makes it in to the PSZ, there's also the factor that apparently Nicholas didn't open all state archives and files to Speransky et al (see here: Marc Raeff, “Preface,” Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns,, trans. and edited by David Griffiths and George E. Munro (Bakersfield: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, 1991), xii.)Then there were a number of books in the early 1800s in which individual authors tried to recover all the laws (or a lot of the laws) pertaining to various subject. I looked at one of them: P. Khavskii, Sobranie zakonov o kuptsakh, meshchanakh, posadskikh i tsekhovykh, ili Gorodovoe Polozhenie so vkliucheniem zakonov predshestvuiushchikh i posleduiushchikh s 1766 po 1823 god (SPb, 1823). I sat there in the Publichka using a usb modem to search through the PSZ online as I looked through the book, to see what wasn't in one or the other. Somewhat to my surprise, the things missing in the PSZ were mostly ukazes from Alexander's reign (and I should note that they may be there, hidden under a different date I had that problem, too, that things were reported oddly).

"...because according to my Blogger Dashboard, the same moadnetirg/captcha requirements should be in place on all my blogs."I just commented at SBP and while I had to log into my Google account and received the Your comment will be visible after approval. message, I didn't have to translate weird code-words.Ooohhmm. Sending out SPAM-blocking karma.Ooohhmm.